Wireless Portability Complaints Tally

Since wireless phone number porting began in the USA last November, the country's telecoms regulator, the FCC has received 4,734 informal complaints about wireless local number portability as of January 23.

Most of the complaints concern alleged delays in porting numbers from one wireless carrier to another.

A much smaller number of complaints, just over 5% of the total, involve alleged delays in porting numbers from wireline carriers to wireless carriers. The carriers mentioned in at least 100 complaints are: AT&T Wireless (2297); Sprint PCS (1119); Verizon Wireless (739); Cingular Wireless (699), T-Mobile (625), Nextel (332); Qwest (195); ALLTEL (119). Many of the complaints concern more than one carrier so the total number of complaints received is smaller than the number of times a carrier is mentioned in a complaint.

The FCC stressed that the existence of a complaint does not necessarily indicate any wrongdoing by the carrier or carriers named, nor do the complaint numbers reflect the relative number of a carrier's subscribers attempting to port a number. The FCC says that more analysis is required to determine what, if any, violation occurred."

Posted to the site on 29th January 2004